Barker College

Barker offers its students a broad range of sporting, cultural and recreational co-curricular activities and programs. Students have opportunities to be involved in Music, Cadets, Debating, Drama productions, Outdoor Education and a choice of over 20 different Sports.

After a thorough systems review, Barker selected Clipboard to be its Extracurricular Management System in 2019. Clipboard integrates into the ‘MyBarker’ student portal, allowing the entire school community to stay up-to-date with their activities.

Cameron Anderson, Head of Sport, recently spoke about his experience using Clipboard at Barker and in his prior role at Pymble Ladies’ College.

What problems did you experience before Clipboard?

“Duty of care was the biggest issue. Not being able to mark the rolls accurately, relying on anything from paper rolls to Excel sheets, to coaches sharing forms, etc. We did not have accurate information coming back to us and we really didn't have a good understanding of who was turning up to training and who was not turning up to training. That was the primary frustration.

The other frustration was not knowing whether the medical information we were giving the coaches was actually up to date. So it may have been medical information from the last time a parent had updated or the last time we received the information from the health care centre and printed it out. It could have been 12 months old. Whereas now with Clipboard, we grab the information from the school's database and it's as live as it can be. That was the second part. The third part was electronic timesheets, and just being able to manage that process.

A paper system, obviously, it's not very accurate. You're relying on staff filling it in, for one, which is quite typical for many casual employees. They're coming straight from uni, they're coming from other jobs, they've got to leave and get home or whatever they may be doing. And you may or may not receive that piece of paper back. And it could be lost in the back of their car or left beside a basketball court or whatever it may be. And if that piece of paper had information on it, which was meant to be private information, then that's a real issue.

And I remember at Pymble at one point, picking up a coach's handbook, which had the roll in the back of it. And there were some things scribbled down, which were private to the student and the coach, and that really concerned me.”

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